4 comments:

I have often thought that for all the importance we have placed historically on a president's "fitness" for office, it's untenable to not perform even a routine mental status exam.

Psychoanalyst Justin Frank, MD, who authored the book, "Bush on the Couch," makes very plain how anyone who drank for as many years as did this president is very likely to have lost cognitive function from the alcohol alone.

Preceding that, in developmental terms, would be any characterological, ah, problems -- which a simple MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the gold standard in basic personality measurement, a paper-and-pencil test validated on thousands of people over the years) would capably and objectively reveal.

Some years ago, I forget which candidate it was, as much as excused himself from running because someone uncovered a past bout of depression and subsequent treatment.

We have a crazy set of criteria when diagnosis and treatment are the death knell for candidacy, while many people in high places, for lack of evaluation (self or otherwise), can take and hold office without any evidence of having "passed" psychological evaluation. It doesn't take a sophisticate to observe cognitive instability and arrested psychological development.

We have reached the nadir when a self-proclaimed, moral-"religious"-ideological non-diagnosis trumps everything else and renders these god-people, de facto, sane.

Kind of like if the president does something, it is by definition legal. That alone is cause for impeachment. I cannot for the life of me understand how the entire Congress is not only spineless, but breaking Constitutional law on a daily basis by permitting all of this. The law of the land makes patently clear who is supposed to answer to whom, and they all have it backward.

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